A strange address

[Yetii]

I accidentally bumped into a bitcoin address that seems to have been doing funny transactions:
https://blockchain.info/address/3QQB6AWxaga6wTs6Xwq8FYppgrGinGu15f

It seems to be constantly paying back to itself, burning 0.0001 BTC transaction fee each time. From the transaction's script, it appears to be a 2-of-3 multisig address. I wonder what might be the usage of such constant, stable, and slow burning of BTCs. Barring the possibility of a buggy trading bot, or deliberate spam (which sounds pretty inefficient), what might be the possible practical uses of such pattern?

[NeuroticFish]

The "Unable to decode output address" part gives a hint.
That address is involved in something related to Counterparty. Either market, either token issuing.
I just barely touched the Counterparty tokens area, so I may be wrong, but any operation you want to do on Counterparty it needs to be carried on the Bitcoin blockchain, so the miners fee has to be paid.

[Mike Mayor]

The "Unable to decode output address" part gives a hint.
That address is involved in something related to Counterparty. Either market, either token issuing.
I just barely touched the Counterparty tokens area, so I may be wrong, but any operation you want to do on Counterparty it needs to be carried on the Bitcoin blockchain, so the miners fee has to be paid.

I think you are right. To gain tokens you need to send BTC to an address on the token faucet. The transactions happening over and over again. Are teatiment to this. The lower miner fee makes sense since if you only sending 0.001 BTC you don't want to pay 0.0004 fee since that is a crazy 40% so they make is 0.0001 BTC then just wait because they not too worried how long it takes.

[pooya87]

The "Unable to decode output address" part gives a hint.
That address is involved in something related to Counterparty. Either market, either token issuing.
I just barely touched the Counterparty tokens area, so I may be wrong, but any operation you want to do on Counterparty it needs to be carried on the Bitcoin blockchain, so the miners fee has to be paid.

i think it is worth adding that the "Unable to decode output address" part that blockchain.info shows is in fact an "OP_Return" script where you can embed data on the blockchain. and the first transaction contains this hex:
285aff00a3e9705820acf51691591178b209f2ab4b4605fb89aad0d20842cfb80ffffffffffffff fff
possibly encrypted text?

anyways do you have anything on counterparty and if this is related that i can read?

[Yetii]

Thanks. The hint about OP_RETURN is interesting. I had a script to grab more of such transactions:

Code:

for txn in $(bitcoin-cli getrawmempool | tr -d '",[]');do 
 if bitcoin-cli decoderawtransaction $(bitcoin-cli getrawtransaction $txn) | grep -o OP_RETURN
 then echo $txn
 fi
done

Interestingly there are more similar addresses, e.g.
https://blockchain.info/address/1PwfQT7Z7GAH4MtPMfjwztJsCbPEsQQVqc

[NeuroticFish]

anyways do you have anything on counterparty and if this is related that i can read?

My story with counterparty is that I've got some assets that run on counterparty.
So I was redirected to counterparty wallet: https://wallet.counterwallet.io/#
If you make a wallet, it contains a bitcoin address. When I've got my tokens I've also got some BTC dust, which looked on blockchain like those "strange" transactions.
I've also learned that while the counter wallet has in-built market, each operation you do costs some satoshi, so I need to send myself some BTC first if I want to play with XCP.

Now, if you want to read more, http://counterparty.io/ and https://counterpartytalk.org/ are two pretty good options, I'd say. However, I just did very few searches for my own problems, to understand the system as end-user, so I can't really help much more than this.

[pooya87]

Thanks. The hint about OP_RETURN is interesting. I had a script to grab more of such transactions:
~

if you are interested to see more of them try this link: https://www.smartbit.com.au/op-returns
play around with the filter on top right corner to see different "categories" that smartbit puts these transactions containing OP_Return in.

there is also this: https://live.blockcypher.com/btc/embed-data/ which i am not sure how it works since i never tried it

@NeuroticFish thanks for the links